Jewish characters in genre novels
rachelmanija is looking for Jewish characters in genre novels:
... especially those written within the last 30 years. By "genre," I mean science fiction and fantasy, genre romance, mainstream superhero comics, and YA and children's novels which are not serious problem novels or in any way about the difficulties of being Jewish.
I am NOT looking for mainstream literature which contains a romance, historical novels other than historical fantasy or historical genre romance, any novel which is largely about anti-Semitism or the Holocaust, mainstream adult novels, picture books, or short stories. I am looking for books which could be considered fun, escapist, not serious literature, etc.
The characters must be clearly stated to be or intended to be Jewish, not maybe arguably coded Jewish (ie, Superman doesn't count). Clear fantasy analogues of Judaism are fine. They must be major characters, not minor supporting characters.
ETA: Very important: no books about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, pogroms, or any other "it sucks to be Jewish" plotlines. I am looking for books in which Jews either get to have fun, or have travails which are not caused by anti-Semitism.
Comment there, not here. Trust me, I am watching the comments closely.
This reminded me of something I forgot to mention yesterday, which is that one of the reasons I like Kate Elliott's Crossroads books is that there aren't any analogues of Christianity in the book, but there is an analogue of Buddhism and one of Jews, if not Judaism. By this I mean that the religious precepts of the Jewish analogues are unclear, but that their relationship to the dominnant culture is very clearly that of Jews: They are considered foreigners even though they've been in the country for two hundred years; they were driven out of their previous country by a religious pogrom, and even that they didn't consider their spiritual home; they are distrusted for their refusal to assimilate to the cultural norms; they are known as merchants and healers; the derogatory term for them is "Silvers," which refers to silver bracelets the men wear, rather than to usury, but which brings up associations about slanders on Jewish money-lenders.
Elliott writes, in The Status Quo Does Not Need World-Building:
[M]inimal world-building championed as a stance against “obsessive world-building” veers dangerously into the territory of perpetuating sexist, racist, and colonialist attitudes. It does so by ignoring the very details and concerns that would make a narrative less status quo in terms of how it deals with social space and material culture as well as other aspects of the human experience.
When people write without considering the implications of material culture & social space in the story they are writing, they often unwittingly default to an expression of how they believe the past worked. This is especially true if they are not thinking about how the material and the social differ from culture to culture, across both space and time, or how it might change in the future.
Which details a writer considers too unimportant to include may often default to the status quo of the writer’s own setting and situation, the writer’s lived experience of social space, because the status quo does not need to be described by those who live at the center of a dominant culture.
One of the ways in which fantasy and sf in English default to an unconsidered status quo is that they tend to default to Christianity. Contemporary or historical fantasies depend on Christian mythologies. (The term "Judeo-Christian" is a whole other can of worms. For now, I will just say that even when religions share beliefs, stories, and histories, these things can have very different meanings in different contexts, and members of a dominant religion do not always realize that their interpretations are not universal.)
By "Christianity," I do not mean just the official religious canon. Once when I was discussing the use of angels in popular culture, a commenter objected that a text depended more on a "Miltonic" interpretation of angels than a "Christian" one. People. You may not have noticed, but John Milton was not Jewish. And he sure isn't talking about Judaism in Paradise Lost.
In secondary world fantasies, religions (at least, those of the protagonists) tend to be modeled on Christianity even when they do not share Christian religious principles. The role of religious organizations is the role Christianity played in medieval Europe. People communicate with their God or Gods via churches, generally through priests as intermediaries. (I realize this very thing is basically what the Protestant Reformation was about, but I am not interested in discussing the infinite diversity of Christianity here.) There are bishops, prelates, and saints. The religions in Rachel Hartman's Seraphina, most of Barbara Hambly's secondary world fantasy, and Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw are not literally Christianity.* But they are Christianity all the same.
* These examples are all books I like, and books whose authors have clearly given some thought to how similar and how different to Christianity their imaginary religions should be to make sense with their imaginary societies. I chose examples that would illustrate a general practice to people who may not have been aware of it before, not to condemn the books, the authors, or the readers who enjoy them.
For a lot of other religions, such as Hinduism and Islam, this focus tends to mean demonization or exoticization, typically in racialized ways. For Judaism, what it usually means is erasure. Somehow, something very similar to Christianity evolved, even though there is no sign whatsoever of a precursor or co-existing analogue to Judaism.
... So if you can add anything to Rachel's list, I would be very happy if you did so.
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